Attila Melegh
Senior Researcher, Demographic Research Institute, Central Statistical Office Budapest Hungary
Associate Professor, Institute of Sociology and Social Policy Corvinus University Budapest Hungary
Associate Professor, Institute of Sociology and Social Policy Corvinus University Budapest Hungary
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Papers by Attila Melegh
“If the Atlantic Charter really committed us to restore free markets where they have disappeared, we might thereby be opening the door to the reintroduction of a crazy nationalism into regions from which it has disappeared.” (Polanyi, “Universal Capitalism or Regional Planning”)
Chris Hann, in his most recent book Repatriating Polanyi, also claims that the deeper causes of the rise of nationalism in Europe are the institutions of a “global neoliberal order.” In this short paper I argue that demographic changes in a global neoliberal era have pushed humankind – and within Europe, East European and (as a test case), very importantly, Hungarian societies – to look for some protection against a global market utopia. These societies reject capital’s interest in replacing missing or outgoing domestic populations with migrants uprooted from regions outside of neighboring countries.
Global level factors
The neoliberal era beginning in the late 1980s has witnessed a number of very important changes in global demographic processes which can make migration a far more controversial issue than in previous periods.
During the period of globalization, migration has been increasing more rapidly than population, while fertility has been continuously declining, causing serious aging of the population. In the meantime, the improvement in the mortality rate has slowed down a bit as compared to previous periods.
Behind the growth in migration is the key role played by the increased mobility of capital, which disembedded and uprooted large segments of societies globally. The resultant economic restructuring and loss of stable jobs have made everyday work and family life far less stable and increased a sense of insecurity.
The debates on migration (based on historically inherited discursive patterns of controlling versus promoting migration) have become fiercer due to increasing welfare benefits and labor competition. This is related to the following interlinked factors: continuous aging of the global population due to declining fertility; the observable decline of the labor force participation rate in active age groups; a minor convergence of wages in which the privileged groups of the West experienced little or no wage increase; and the overall stagnation of redistribution levels since the mid-1990s, as explained by Böröcz in a 2016 paper on “Global Inequality in Redistribution.”
European level factors
The historically low fertility of Europe compared to the global average, and the continued above-average aging while losing some of the mortality advantages of the continent, point towards the increased importance of demographic factors in explaining why all of Europe has become so anxious about migration. It is related to the paradoxical migration versus welfare competition in a neoliberal era. The mobility of capital has been very high (the net flow of Foreign Direct Investment has been above global levels). Europe’s complexly embedded socialist economies were dismantled for the sake of this mobility, which in itself led to massive loss of jobs and massive population mobility in an open, but unequally developed space. We also see that Europe as a privileged region in terms of per capita economic well-being has been experiencing a decline of global significance while continuing to have high – and above global – levels of migration.
Regional and local level factors
If we compare long-term employment we can see that from an all-time high – well above global levels – in the 1980s in East European countries, labor force participation rates fell well below European and even global levels in the 1990s and 2000s, before climbing back in the 2010s. Thus, there were two lost decades, which had a major impact on these societies.
This period of shock economics meant massive disembeddedness and uprooting. As Hann argues, this meant that radical macro-level changes went blatantly against the norms and everyday practices of people in the transition to “market society.” Concerning immigration, the key feature is that the whole region, including Hungary, sends large flows of people to the West but only receives migrants from the immediate region; further links are rare and relatively weak. According to the United Nations, in 2015 more than 25 million people who were born in the smaller states of Eastern Europe did not live in their country of birth; meanwhile, the total number of immigrants, mainly from the immediate region, just exceeded 10 million, indicating large-scale population losses.
The consequences of the unequal exchange with Western countries (capital moves in and labor moves out) – loss of labor and skills; an increasing mismatch between labor demand and labor supply; and loss of social and tax payments, especially within the overall process of ageing – are serious from the point of view of the nation-state and its social welfare system. It may be possible to argue that, as opposed to the global – and to some extent even European – tendency toward stable population growth there is a threat that some countries in Eastern Europe will be unable to function from a demographic point of view without huge tensions in their already truncated social welfare systems. This can explain why some East European populations are so open to fears of a population exchange.
We can argue that the interest of business and capital is clearly in a “fictitious exchange of migrant labor.” In a neoliberal framework they are happy to take labor out and offer the sending regions the opportunity of “importing” equally abstract labor. This is rejected by the local communities and some nationalist governments as being a catastrophic option in the midst of demographic fragility. Paradoxically, and in some ways tragically, this panic is especially effective when the issue is the recent refugee crisis caused by the tensions and wars of the last 30 years of neoliberalism. But there can be no national or nationalist answer for such tensions and contradictions. Only a global double movement can formulate an answer which might show a way out of the current tension, instead of the mechanical, authoritarian defense of the national or local “demographic body.” The move out of the neoliberal order might be the only way to assure the dignity of migrants and non-migrants throughout the world simultaneously.
diverse areas and different forms of work with varying wage levels by forming worldwide networks. In the Eastern European region, the growing level of emigration and relatively low fertility are leading to
population loss. Hungary is not among the Eastern European countries with a high level of emigration; nevertheless, it faces serious challenges, particularly in some regions where after the transition losses of
jobs were massive, and a greater proportion of people live under the poverty line than the national average. Our analysis is based on interviews, containing narrative and semi-structured parts, among domestic workers working mainly in Austria and Germany. The paper reveals possible causal mechanisms and the political economic structures behind this type of labour migration. We seek to understand how migration related decisions are embedded in a global and highly unequal economic order.
on country of birth, more than 65% of all residents come from Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine), while
it only has less important links with other European or non-European countries. In this regard, Hungary has
a well-developed institutional system that supports co-ethnic groups, which leads to very high levels of naturalisation
among them.
• Nonetheless, it can be demonstrated that their immigration can also be negatively seen by the receiving
https://www.population-europe.eu/discussion-paper/discussion-paper-no-8-similar-different
communities, as evidenced in interviews with immigrants, and their integration level can be associated with
various factors like length of stay or level of education.
• Immigrants that arrive without the ability to speak Hungarian can have relatively high levels of integration
into the labour market if they are in the country for a longer period of time and have a high level of education.
• Thus, immigrant groups with or, very interestingly, without a Hungarian background show relatively high
levels of integration. Hungary faces little structural integration problems in this respect.
https://www.iir.cz/en/,
M INTERJÚ - 41'04"
Fény: Marius Clopot
Hang: Răzvan Nițescu
Kép: Ovidiu Cristescu
Vezető operatőr: Sánta Ádám
Vágó: T. Bányai Péter
Szerkesztő: E. Ferencz Judit
TVR1 - MAGYARADÁS az egyesen
2017.03.14.
tesszük szóvá, nem a földosztás, a termelőeszközök szocializálásának, az analfabetizmus felszámolásának stb. elhallgatását rójuk fel. „Csak” azt kívánjuk illusztrálni, hogy a mainstream ideológiai konstrukció miként iktatja ki a történeti megemlékezésből a (késő)gyarmati terrort, ami a világ népességének óriási területeit érintette. Amint ezt a globális fordulatot megtesszük, s többek között kilépünk a nemzeti-áldozati önsajnálatból, és helyi történeteinket a globálisan megélt társadalmi
tapasztalatok alapján építjük fel, akkor újra kell, kellene gondolnunk, hogy milyen valós strukturális tényezők vezettek el a tömeges politikai erőszakhoz, a nemzeti szuverenitás elvesztéséhez.
“If the Atlantic Charter really committed us to restore free markets where they have disappeared, we might thereby be opening the door to the reintroduction of a crazy nationalism into regions from which it has disappeared.” (Polanyi, “Universal Capitalism or Regional Planning”)
Chris Hann, in his most recent book Repatriating Polanyi, also claims that the deeper causes of the rise of nationalism in Europe are the institutions of a “global neoliberal order.” In this short paper I argue that demographic changes in a global neoliberal era have pushed humankind – and within Europe, East European and (as a test case), very importantly, Hungarian societies – to look for some protection against a global market utopia. These societies reject capital’s interest in replacing missing or outgoing domestic populations with migrants uprooted from regions outside of neighboring countries.
Global level factors
The neoliberal era beginning in the late 1980s has witnessed a number of very important changes in global demographic processes which can make migration a far more controversial issue than in previous periods.
During the period of globalization, migration has been increasing more rapidly than population, while fertility has been continuously declining, causing serious aging of the population. In the meantime, the improvement in the mortality rate has slowed down a bit as compared to previous periods.
Behind the growth in migration is the key role played by the increased mobility of capital, which disembedded and uprooted large segments of societies globally. The resultant economic restructuring and loss of stable jobs have made everyday work and family life far less stable and increased a sense of insecurity.
The debates on migration (based on historically inherited discursive patterns of controlling versus promoting migration) have become fiercer due to increasing welfare benefits and labor competition. This is related to the following interlinked factors: continuous aging of the global population due to declining fertility; the observable decline of the labor force participation rate in active age groups; a minor convergence of wages in which the privileged groups of the West experienced little or no wage increase; and the overall stagnation of redistribution levels since the mid-1990s, as explained by Böröcz in a 2016 paper on “Global Inequality in Redistribution.”
European level factors
The historically low fertility of Europe compared to the global average, and the continued above-average aging while losing some of the mortality advantages of the continent, point towards the increased importance of demographic factors in explaining why all of Europe has become so anxious about migration. It is related to the paradoxical migration versus welfare competition in a neoliberal era. The mobility of capital has been very high (the net flow of Foreign Direct Investment has been above global levels). Europe’s complexly embedded socialist economies were dismantled for the sake of this mobility, which in itself led to massive loss of jobs and massive population mobility in an open, but unequally developed space. We also see that Europe as a privileged region in terms of per capita economic well-being has been experiencing a decline of global significance while continuing to have high – and above global – levels of migration.
Regional and local level factors
If we compare long-term employment we can see that from an all-time high – well above global levels – in the 1980s in East European countries, labor force participation rates fell well below European and even global levels in the 1990s and 2000s, before climbing back in the 2010s. Thus, there were two lost decades, which had a major impact on these societies.
This period of shock economics meant massive disembeddedness and uprooting. As Hann argues, this meant that radical macro-level changes went blatantly against the norms and everyday practices of people in the transition to “market society.” Concerning immigration, the key feature is that the whole region, including Hungary, sends large flows of people to the West but only receives migrants from the immediate region; further links are rare and relatively weak. According to the United Nations, in 2015 more than 25 million people who were born in the smaller states of Eastern Europe did not live in their country of birth; meanwhile, the total number of immigrants, mainly from the immediate region, just exceeded 10 million, indicating large-scale population losses.
The consequences of the unequal exchange with Western countries (capital moves in and labor moves out) – loss of labor and skills; an increasing mismatch between labor demand and labor supply; and loss of social and tax payments, especially within the overall process of ageing – are serious from the point of view of the nation-state and its social welfare system. It may be possible to argue that, as opposed to the global – and to some extent even European – tendency toward stable population growth there is a threat that some countries in Eastern Europe will be unable to function from a demographic point of view without huge tensions in their already truncated social welfare systems. This can explain why some East European populations are so open to fears of a population exchange.
We can argue that the interest of business and capital is clearly in a “fictitious exchange of migrant labor.” In a neoliberal framework they are happy to take labor out and offer the sending regions the opportunity of “importing” equally abstract labor. This is rejected by the local communities and some nationalist governments as being a catastrophic option in the midst of demographic fragility. Paradoxically, and in some ways tragically, this panic is especially effective when the issue is the recent refugee crisis caused by the tensions and wars of the last 30 years of neoliberalism. But there can be no national or nationalist answer for such tensions and contradictions. Only a global double movement can formulate an answer which might show a way out of the current tension, instead of the mechanical, authoritarian defense of the national or local “demographic body.” The move out of the neoliberal order might be the only way to assure the dignity of migrants and non-migrants throughout the world simultaneously.
diverse areas and different forms of work with varying wage levels by forming worldwide networks. In the Eastern European region, the growing level of emigration and relatively low fertility are leading to
population loss. Hungary is not among the Eastern European countries with a high level of emigration; nevertheless, it faces serious challenges, particularly in some regions where after the transition losses of
jobs were massive, and a greater proportion of people live under the poverty line than the national average. Our analysis is based on interviews, containing narrative and semi-structured parts, among domestic workers working mainly in Austria and Germany. The paper reveals possible causal mechanisms and the political economic structures behind this type of labour migration. We seek to understand how migration related decisions are embedded in a global and highly unequal economic order.
on country of birth, more than 65% of all residents come from Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine), while
it only has less important links with other European or non-European countries. In this regard, Hungary has
a well-developed institutional system that supports co-ethnic groups, which leads to very high levels of naturalisation
among them.
• Nonetheless, it can be demonstrated that their immigration can also be negatively seen by the receiving
https://www.population-europe.eu/discussion-paper/discussion-paper-no-8-similar-different
communities, as evidenced in interviews with immigrants, and their integration level can be associated with
various factors like length of stay or level of education.
• Immigrants that arrive without the ability to speak Hungarian can have relatively high levels of integration
into the labour market if they are in the country for a longer period of time and have a high level of education.
• Thus, immigrant groups with or, very interestingly, without a Hungarian background show relatively high
levels of integration. Hungary faces little structural integration problems in this respect.
https://www.iir.cz/en/,
M INTERJÚ - 41'04"
Fény: Marius Clopot
Hang: Răzvan Nițescu
Kép: Ovidiu Cristescu
Vezető operatőr: Sánta Ádám
Vágó: T. Bányai Péter
Szerkesztő: E. Ferencz Judit
TVR1 - MAGYARADÁS az egyesen
2017.03.14.
tesszük szóvá, nem a földosztás, a termelőeszközök szocializálásának, az analfabetizmus felszámolásának stb. elhallgatását rójuk fel. „Csak” azt kívánjuk illusztrálni, hogy a mainstream ideológiai konstrukció miként iktatja ki a történeti megemlékezésből a (késő)gyarmati terrort, ami a világ népességének óriási területeit érintette. Amint ezt a globális fordulatot megtesszük, s többek között kilépünk a nemzeti-áldozati önsajnálatból, és helyi történeteinket a globálisan megélt társadalmi
tapasztalatok alapján építjük fel, akkor újra kell, kellene gondolnunk, hogy milyen valós strukturális tényezők vezettek el a tömeges politikai erőszakhoz, a nemzeti szuverenitás elvesztéséhez.
How should we understand such discursive patterns? From where do the involved mental maps come from, which we understand as key ideational mechanisms about how knowledge on demographic and migratory processes are structured? How are various demographic developments and actors of the world represented? How should we interpret anti-immigration demographic nationalism, which can be understood as a combination of selective antiimmigration discourses and regulations with straightforward, state-sponsored pronatalism and the use of “own resources” for the sake of improving our standing within Europe? How can we link these discursive and political events and the underlying mental maps to demographic structures and changes? What challenges do the structural processes of fertility, migration, and mortality show, and how can we interpret the political reaction given to
them during the Orbán regime? First, I shall provide a historical-structural
analysis of demographic processes and then review policies and institutionalized norms that shape mental maps and that are shaped by mental maps. Finally, I will look at the interrelationship between material structures, processes, and political discourses in order to complete a complex and dynamic analysis of Hungarian demographic nationalism in the 2010s.
The new interest in global demographic history is also related to the demographic shrinking of Europe and the so called West. In 1950 this region represented 29 almost 30 percent of the world population, by the early 2000s they lost at least 10 or even 15 percentage points in their share (countries of Europe overall returned back to the 18th century levels), while they have lost only some percentage points in the overall control of wealth, with the exception of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, which halved their share in global GDP. (Demény-McNicoll, 2005) This is due to the global and differential decline of fertility and nuptiality where Europe has reached comparatively very low levels and in the framework of global competitive capitalism it has become even more interested in gaining further migrants to maintain various sectors of the economy. Even more the current restructuring of the world economy and the related crises of various regions and the massive outflow of people also remind us acutely that processes are interrelated, and there is a need to build global databases of demography including migration, which leads to the need for a new global history of demographic change. New (post-family planning) global, migration-population strategies and policies will shape global or transnational research in historical demography and even the history of migration. Even more in contrast to the 1940s and 1950s today in migration for instance we already have set of rapidly developing set of international laws and organizations which clearly aim at controlling national and/or block type (e.g. EU, Nafta, Mercosur etc.) processes or within the blocks like the EU we have a complex set of laws guiding spatial movement of people within and at the external borders. Thus the need for understanding global processes will increase as exemplified by the post 2013 refugee crisis effecting the whole Mediterranean and Western Asian region together with Europe. Such developments of globalization will further influence global history writing.
eighteenth century, more than a century after the birth of political arithmetics and demography. The idea of comparative population development (concerning relevant social institutions and processes of marriage, family, fertility, and mortality) and its relationship to other social institutions and arrangements appeared earlier, most importantly with regard to nations and local communities, but there was no concept of identifying various geographic spaces with specific demographic behavior.
The chapter argues that concepts and ideas of demographic regions have been parts of evolving, many times conflicting discourses on how competing nations and their regions (their relevant social institutions) fit into a global fight over resources and related developmental opportunities within the context of global and local developmental and social hierarchies. The paper claims that five major periods can be established in this history: from the early 18th century till the end of it, early 19th century till the First World War, the period between the World Wars, from the Second World War till the 1980s and the period afterwards. The paper also argues that till the last third of the 20th century fertility and nuptiality (marriage) have been the main concerns while afterwards these concepts of regions were deconstructed and probably gave way to heated debates over migration.
Historical origins: hierarchical/colonial imaginations coming from outside Around three hundred years ago, a massive mental structure appeared in Europe, which promoted a hierarchical understanding of global social change based on colonial imagination (Amin 1989;Thornton 2005; Said 1978; Mignolo 2000; Böröcz 2004, 2009; Wallerstein 1979, 1991, 1997; Hobsbawm, 1987: chapter 1 and 6; Wolff 1994). The key element of this hierarchical imagination is to see different parts and people of the world as being hierarchically ordered regarding development. It was also understood temporarily. Less developed people represented the past of the most developed ones. Following the analysis of Larry Wolff, we can term this complex framework as an idea of civilizational slope (Wolff 1994). In this structure, almost all political and social actors in the “East” and “West” identify themselves on a descending scale from “civilization to barbarism”, from “developed to non-developed” status. (Melegh 2006; Wolff 1994).
Kerekasztalbeszélgetés a "Wir Sind Jung, Wir Sind Stark" ("Fiatalok és erősek") című filmről az Art+Cinema moziban Budapesten, 2016. február 26-n. Résztvevők: Böröcz József, Krausz Tamás, László Luca és Melegh Attila.